November 3, 2009

well folks, it’s been a great weekend. I’m listening to exile again and am really impressed with how well the band pulled this off. page’s vocals and piano especially shine through the halloween set.

It was great getting to hang with good friends and make new friends all weekend. We got a lot of praise for our costumes (which had to be the best at the fest), the festival grounds were amazing and the visual candy (flame throwers, burbles, etc) were epic.

Thanks to JT and Taboot Art for being our base of operations, thanks to JT for being an awesome person, thanks to the Joker for his UPS package hilarity, thanks to everyone who told us ‘great costumes’, thanks to the weirdo lady during the acoustic set who was wearing nothing but a slip and kept pulling it up above your waist (it was hysterical), thanks to the folks operating the Burble — that thing is amazing. thanks in and out burger. thanks to tito and his walking stick, and to the guy with the plastic ‘roor’ in the line to get in Sunday. thanks to the mounted patrol for letting us take a picture with you (picture to come)

no thanks to: the guy who knew all the words to every song on Exile on Main Street and let everyone know it at the top of his lungs the entire set, the creeper old woman who snaked in on at least three of our sessions without even asking, and whoever ate all the donuts before we could get there, no thanks to the toolbags with laser pointers (you all suck).

i’ll likely get around to some sort of full review of the tunes and each day’s sets, but for now you can all simply enjoy these pics. I’ll get more up when I get a chance to hook erin’s camera up to the computer:

slap bag guy:

here’s ass lady. she just kept pulling up her slip like it wasn’t a big deal — flashing her ass right in the face of these two girls behind her. She also pulled up the front, showing her vag to anyone who happened to turn around:

the light from the flame-throwing oil towers behind us during the last set:

November 1, 2009

phish’s approach to the Stone’s ‘Exile on Main Street’ was spot on. As Nickel said before the show, ‘I’m expecting them to show me this album in new ways’.

The background singers and horns were exactly what the band needed, and the sound from the stage was bigger than anything i’ve heard phish put on. The way they pulled off Tumbling Dice through Loving Cup was amazing, actually. They jammed out tumbling dice a bit, and Loving Cup was easily the best version they have ever ever pulled off — complete with horns and background singers. Stop Breaking Down was pretty raging too.

The third set:
Backwards Down the Number Line >
Fluffhead
Ghost
When the Circus Comes
You Enjoy Myself

was awesome. BDTNL was very well done, they really explored that song out this time around and while the transition into fluffhead wasn’t as clear as they probably intended, by the time the song took off it was perfect. Trey was adding little guitar noodlings all throughout the composed part. There was also the biggest glowstick war I ahve ever seen during this and then into Ghost.

We left the grounds around 1 a.m., got home and grubbed by the hot tub for a while. headed back to the fest around 11 for the daytime set, then back home for some NFL football before heading back up for the rest of the festival.

not much else to report. my brain hurts, so i’m sorry if this is just rambling.

SET ONE
Sample In A Jar
The Divided Sky
Lawn Boy
Kill Devil Falls
Bathtub Gin
The Squirming Coil
Runaway Jim >
Possum
Run Like An Antelope

SET TWO
Rocks Off
Rip This Joint
Shake Your Hips
Casino Boogie
Tumbling Dice
Sweet Virginia
Torn and Frayed
Sweet Black Angel
Loving Cup
Happy
Turd On The Run
Ventilator Blues >
I Just Want To See His Face
Let It Loose
All Down The Line
Stop Breaking Down
Shine A Light
Soul Survivor

SET THREE
Backwards Down the Number Line >
Fluffhead
Ghost
When the Circus Comes
You Enjoy Myself

October 31, 2009

it is apparently exile on main street… there’s people on the inside that have seen the playbill for tonight’s show.

there’s also an ad on the inside of the playbill for “DAVID BOWIE/UB40” at American Airlines arena over NYE — so phish is announcing NYE miami.

whooop!

HELL YEAH.

Exile on Main St. is the tenth studio album by English rock band The Rolling Stones. It was released as a double LP in 1972 and drew on influences from rock & roll, blues, country and soul. Initially “Exile” was greeted with lukewarm reviews, but is now widely considered among the band’s finest work and one of the defining masterpieces of the rock era.[2] In 2003, the album was ranked number 7, the band’s highest position, on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[3]

Recording began in earnest sometime near the middle of June. Bassist Bill Wyman recalls the band working all night, every night, from eight in the evening until three the following morning for the rest of the month. Wyman said of the times, “…not everyone turned up every night. This was, for me, one of the major frustrations of this whole period. For our previous two albums we had worked well and listened to producer Jimmy Miller. At Nellcôte things were very different and it took me a while to understand why…” By this time Richards had begun a daily habit of using heroin. Thousands of dollars of heroin flowed through the mansion each week in addition to a contingent of visitors that included the likes of William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Gram Parsons, and Marshall Chess (who was running the Stones’ new label).[5] Contrary to popular belief, Parsons does not appear on the album and was asked to leave Nellcôte in early July 1971, the result of both his obnoxious behaviour and an attempt by Richards to clean the house of drug users as the result of pressure from the French police.
Richards’ steadily growing addiction began to inhibit his ability to perform, often leading the band having to record in altered forms without every member present. A notable instance was the recording of one of Richards’ most famous songs, “Happy”. Recorded in the basement, Richards said in 1982, “‘Happy’ was something I did because I was for one time EARLY for a session. There was Bobby Keys and Jimmy Miller… We had nothing to do and had suddenly picked up the guitar and played this riff. So we cut it and it’s the record, it’s the same. We cut the original track with a baritone sax, a guitar and Jimmy Miller on drums. And the rest of it is built up over that track. It was just an afternoon jam that everybody said, ‘Wow, yeah, work on it'”.
The basic band for the Nellcôte sessions is believed to have consisted of Richards, Bobby Keys, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Miller (a notable drummer in his own right who covered for an absentee Watts on the aforementioned “Happy” and “Shine a Light”),[4] and Jagger when he was available. Wyman did not like the ambience of the Richards’ villa and sat out many of the French sessions. As Wyman appeared on only eight songs of the released album, the other bass parts were played by Taylor, Richards, and, on four tracks, upright bassist Bill Plummer. Wyman noted in his memoir Stone Alone that there was a clear dichotomy between the band members who freely indulged in drugs (Richards, Miller, Keys, Taylor, engineer Andy Johns) and those who more or less abstained (Wyman, Watts, and Jagger).[5]

ndio police are encouraging attendees at this weekend’s Phish Festival 8 to refrain from smoking marijuana to have a good time.

Police aren’t disclosing their methods but said they will be on the lookout for anyone caught doing drugs during the three-day event at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

Samuel Martin, who writes at phishandthedead.blogspot.com, does not dispute that Phish fans tend to smoke marijuana at concerts just as the Grateful Dead’s Deadheads.

“Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of it,” he said. “(But) it’s not like there’s going to be a truckload of drug addicts coming to town.”

Violators may face a $100 to $500 fine and/or up to a year in Riverside County jail.

“The bottom line is just don’t do it,” Indio police spokesman Ben Guitron said. “Don’t make it a memorable experience in the county jail.”

The polo grounds have hosted numerous multi-day music events with their share of arrests.

Sixty-nine people were arrested during this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and there were 22 arrests at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival.

Martin said he does not believe Phish’s mellow fans are likely to cause trouble.

“Fans don’t go out of their way to stand on top of Volkswagen buses and wave bags of weed,” Martin said. “It’s not going to be that extreme, but they are carefree.”

San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials issued similar warnings to attendees at this past weekend’s Cypress Hill Smokeout Festival in San Bernardino, which celebrated marijuana legalization and its therapeutic uses.

Aside from detecting the smell of marijuana in the air, officials were “pleasantly surprised” that there were no arrests made, department spokeswoman Jodi Miller said.

“There was a fight on Saturday, and the crowd basically took care of it,” she said.

October 22, 2009

well, grad ,school and work and life have gotten in the way lately… and i haven’t really even gone out to see much live music OR been skiing yet… so there’s not much to report.

HOWEVER… in 8 days I’ll be traveling (with 8 people) to phish’s 8th festival, Festival 8 (isn’t that great!) over Halloween weekend at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA — at the site of the Coachella Music and Arts festival.

while festivals in the past have had as many as 80k people in attendence (NYE 2000 in Florida), this one is rumored to be about half that size…

Phish will be selecting a ‘musical costume’ to wear on Halloween night, and http://www.phish.com has set up a really cool gallery of the 100 possible albums — with more and more getting killed by arrows, axes or knives over the last few weeks as the concert draws closer. My pick all along was the Rolling Stones ‘Exile on Main St.’, which is still in the running (and according to rumored maps of the site which have each campground named after a final album, will be one of the final 8 albums going into the festival).

my other pick would be Boston’s self-titled album or Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust — though neither of them are part of the rumored final 8.

as for OUR costume, we have decided that in honor of going to the polo club for the weekend we would don polo attire and go as Polo Team 8…. Er and I are getting the custom polo shirts screen printed right now. This isn’t the final logo — i’m saving that to show until the festival — but our initial sketch was something like this:

this is my first phish festival since Big Cypress (new years eve 2000), so i’m pretty pumped… Phish tends to go all-out in preparing for these fests, with massive art installations, carnival rides, vending, etc… plus there’s the entertainment of being around thousands of phish heads (this time in southern cali) camping together. Apparently there’s a massive area for trading music, a huge bar with ‘EXTRA BLOODY’ bloody marys, big screens for MLB playoffs and NFL games on sunday and (most importantly for you, dear readers) free wifi, so I will be updating live during the day (or, when i feel like it) from the fest. With 8 sets of music (including a Sunday-morning acoustic set, complete with coffee and 8-shaped donuts).

Also, Team Bleedingsenses (aka Team Awesome) has rented a golf chalet to stay in all weekend with 9-10 other Colorado music freaks.
Its’ way too nice for us (as usual), and apparently in the same neighborhood where team phish was looking to rent a few places (most likely for this week during the setup), so you never know who our neighbors could be. (though they will likely be some weirded-out retirees who just want some peace and quiet so they can wake up and play on their top-rated golf course in the morning)